Foozle is dead. His (her, their, its) foul lair has crumbled into itty-bitty pieces of rock. The crowd cheers. The world is saved. Now what?

Usually, nothing. The game is over. It’s all sunshine and happiness, despite the mess Foozle left behind him. It somehow gets “swept under the carpet”. Even if the game continues, most people walking around don’t have anything to say about Foozle’s downfall.

Then again, have you noticed that the towns and cities don’t seem to be especially affected by all those monsters running around outside the walls? Once in awhile, you have the “town under siege”, which you manage to break all by yourself (Diablo 2, Act V, for instance).

Otherwise, if you never step outside town, you’d never know that “something evil is afoot” out there. Few people appear to be worried by a wilderness overrun with all manner of hostile creatures.

Everything goes on as before; even trade is not affected. Merchants always have stuff for sale, usually new stock with each visit. How did that stuff get through the ravening hordes?

So maybe it isn’t so strange after all that world is much the same as before. Most of Foozle’s dirty work seems to have happened in some other dimension. Or at least, outside of town, which in most games, comes to the same thing. Yeah, there really isn’t a lot of cleaning up to do once “the Big Bad Dude” is taken down. Fantasy, ya gotta love it!

Not only that, but when you DO get to cleanup,… nothing happens. There’s usually no sign that you really accomplished anything (at most, the townspeople may express their thanks). Was it Neverwinter Nights where you cleaned up a bandit-ridden part of town, but whenever you returned, there were still fires burning, still trash everywhere, still sounds of screaming, still no one on the streets, and no sign of rebuilding? (I’m not entirely sure that was the game, since I get them mixed up.) That was hugely disappointing.

In general, I like to build up, rather than tear down. OK, I loved the terror raids in X-COM: UFO Defense, where I’d rush in to kill aliens and rescue citizens,… and leave the town a smoking ruin behind me. How could you not enjoy that? But my all-time favorite game, Civ II, allowed me to build cities, roads and railroads, irrigate farms, and in general create a thriving, er,… civilization. Combat was necessary, but not the whole point, or even the most important point.

So, as I mentioned earlier, I’d like to play a game that BEGAN with the defeat of Foozle, where my characters would work to restore the world. But I’d have to SEE (and hear) progress. My actions, my choices (and I’d like to see some hard choices) would make a difference. And as I returned to towns, later in the game, I’d be able to see continued progress (assuming that I’d helped them – otherwise, a worse situation). Perhaps there’d be new problems, but I’d want to SEE a community grow, as I helped to make it possible.

And then extend this across the gameworld, as I assisted individual towns and also helped to connect them into a thriving society again (by killing bandits, protecting merchants, assisting road-building crews, clearing the monsters from navigable rivers, etc.)

Wouldn’t it be great to first see a town overrun by bandits, trash-filled, with fires burning and citizens cowering in their homes, but then SEE the changes after you’d dealt with the problem? And as time went on, to see continued growth, re-building, immigration, etc. – all because of what your party had managed to do?

I would think the aftermath would be better suited to a strategy or Sim City type game rather than a RPG. Instead of the disasters that Sim City throws at you, make the setting in a fantasy world where you are recovering from Orc sieges or the effects of Foozle’s destruction.

I think the last two commentators hit it on the head – strategy games do this all the time. Several of the scenarios in Tropico started with the fall of the bad old tyrannical regime (and, being Tropico, with the beginning of your good, new tyrannical regime…but you had to rebuild).

Keeping all commentary on current events off of this blessedly non-political website, I will say…defeating the tyrant and reconstructing his country afterwards don’t have the same feel. Reconstruction, even with diplomacy and insurgency thrown in, isn’t an “adventure-y” kind of thing that moves like an RPG.

Now, grafting a strategy game onto an RPG would suit me perfectly, but people like (ahem!) Scorpia, who like RPG’s but not strategy games (and have besides a rooted aversion to politics), they might be disappointed.

It could pretty seamlessly be done in a pencil-and-paper game, especally with only one player (long-term “political adventures” are harder to coordinate with multiple players – assuming they’re all cooperating and you don’t want the game to be mostly solos). My current by-email game may end up there, in fact (with a bit of free Kriegspiel thrown in).

But then, a good pencil-and-paper game is not bound by modes of gaming, and I once knew a DM who would cheerfully switch us to the occasional boardgame, with our characters as players, and with notice that the results of the boardgame would affect what happened next in the world (in particular, this game, but also some others).